Meet the typical geriatric Gen Zer: The last of their generation to study in a classroom and work in an office

For the oldest Gen Zers, remote work wasn't always the norm.

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• The oldest Gen Zers, born around 1996, are different from their younger peers.
• They're the last Gen Zers to attend all of college in person and enter the workforce in person.
• To invoke a term for the eldest millennials, this cohort could be considered "geriatric Gen Z."

In the first year of the pandemic, millennials lost their crown as the cool generation, and Gen Zers took the throne. Claw clips are (back) in; skinny jeans are out.

As with any big transition, there are some growing pains — and there's a subset of Gen Zers who don't quite have a home: the eldest.

Part of a generation born between about 1996 and 2012, these Gen Zers are in their mid-20s, with the oldest turning 26 this year.

In light of the popularity of the term "geriatric millennial" to refer to the eldest millennials — those straddling the digital divide between older and younger generations in the workplace — we're calling them "geriatric Gen Zers."

Sometimes called elder Gen Z, this group is sandwiched between the Gen Zers who just turned 21 and the millennials who've already spent more than a decade adulting. Like geriatric millennials, they're defined by their experience in the workforce: They're the only members of their generation to have gone into the office regularly before the era of remote work.

While Gen Z is on track to becoming the most educated generation, the eldest Gen Zers were the last group to have a traditional four-year college experience untouched by the pandemic. Their first years of post-graduation work largely started in person, then become remote, then settled into … whatever it is they're doing now.

Here's what it means to be a geriatric Gen Zer.

The typical geriatric Gen Zer is a cusper, identifying with both millennials and Gen Z.

Hadley McCormick, a 25-year-old marketing coordinator in Illinois, doesn't quite consider herself Gen Z; she aligns more with millennials.

Courtesy of Hadley McCormick

Just a week ago, Tiara Williams, 26, a financial-services specialist, looked up when the millennial generation ends. She found different answers on different websites — characteristic of geriatric Gen Z's cusper status.

"I feel like some days I rock the side part, some days I rock the middle part," Williams said. "I feel like I'm just right in between."

Hadley McCormick, a 25-year-old marketing coordinator in Illinois, doesn't quite consider herself Gen Z; she aligns more with millennials.

"We're right on the cusp," she said.

She said she has some "grandma hobbies," like gardening and knitting, that are distinctly more millennial — but she's also spending a lot of her time on social media and loves to play video games, things she considers more Gen Z.

It's sentiments like these that led WGSN to deem the eldest Gen Zers and youngest millennials "Zennials," part of an "in-between" microgeneration, in a 2020 trend report.

Jean Twenge, a psychologist who wrote the book "iGen: Why Today's Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy — and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood — and What That Means for the Rest of Us," said that generational categories are "somewhat arbitrary," and even more so when it comes to microgenerations.

"But it is definitely true that someone born in 1995, for example, has a different experience from someone born in 2010," Twenge said.

They're part of a digitally native generation, but they didn't get their first smartphone until later in life compared with their younger peers.

The iPhone, popular among Gen Zers, didn't even exist until geriatric Gen Zers were around 10 or 11.

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It's probably hard for a geriatric Gen Zer to remember a time before they had access to the internet. But that doesn't mean all of Gen Z has the same experience.

"One of the bigger differences is that those Gen Zers born in the late '90s typically got their first smartphone maybe in the middle of high school," Twenge said.

McCormick said she had "one of those, like, kickflip phones where it would turn sideways and be a keyboard." She guessed that she got her first iPhone around 14 or 15. Williams said she got hers in 10th grade.

"When I was a kid, we had the computer room, and we had the one computer for the family, and we would play the built-in games, like solitaire," Williams said.

Common Sense Media found in a 2019 report, based on a survey of 1,600 8- to 18-year-olds, that 53% of kids had smartphones by the time they were 11 and that 69% had them by age 12.

The iPhone, popular among Gen Zers, didn't even exist until geriatric Gen Zers were around 10 or 11; the first iPhone launched in January 2007. The Common Sense survey found that 19% of 8-year-olds had a phone in 2019, up from 11% in 2015.

The typical geriatric Gen Zer was a preteen when the Great Recession hit — too young to be directly affected, but old enough to be scared of a future economic downturn.

Too young to feel direct impacts from the Great Recession, the eldest of Gen Z definitely felt the pandemic recession.

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The WGSN report explains that the oldest Gen Zers were too young to see the financial crisis of 2008 affect their own finances or job prospects, but they were old enough to possibly see it affect their parents or siblings.

"They came of age baring witness to the impact the crisis had on older counterparts," the report says, adding that they knew another downturn could happen again even though the economy had recovered by the time they graduated.

And it did: The coronavirus recession, though short-lived, hit the oldest Gen Zers during their early working years.

The pandemic made geriatric Gen Zers the last cohort of their generation to attend all four years of college in person.

Older Gen Z experienced college campuses IRL.

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If the eldest Gen Zers were born in 1997, then those who opted for a four-year degree and didn't have a gap year likely graduated in 2018 and 2019.

For them, college was likely in person. In 2019, only 17% of students enrolled in higher education were attending exclusively through distance-learning programs. But that became the norm the following year when universities temporarily closed their doors and many Gen Zers were forced to live out their college experience from their childhood bedrooms.

While many schools are no longer solely online, younger Gen Zers will face the specter of the pandemic in the classroom, whether it means masking up during lectures or learning in isolation.

They were trained in the norms of in-person work, as the last of their generation to join the workforce while Zoom meetings weren't a daily thing.

Many geriatric Gen Zers worked in a real office alongside coworkers.

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The pandemic disrupted the work environment as the eldest Gen Zer knew it. Along with the rest of the workforce, they had to acclimate to remote work — now the norm for the Gen Zers who graduated in 2020 and beyond.

"Every other job I've had as far as internships and stuff in my past during college has been in person," McCormick, the marketing coordinator, said. She started her current role the week the pandemic closed everything and is now back to in-person work.

"I think our generation grew up with a lot of ideas about workplaces and jobs and the culture that has basically evolved rapidly since the pandemic," McCormick said. "The rise of remote work — that wasn't really a thing when we were in college."

Of course, geriatric Gen Zers who went straight to grad school may have missed starting work in person, especially if they were enrolled in a program for longer than a year.

Having experienced the best of both worlds, geriatric Gen Zers feel conflicted about the trade-offs of working from home and working from the office so early on in their career.

The pandemic got in the way of geriatric Gen Z's "working 20s."

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McCormick — a self-proclaimed "extroverted introvert" — said that while she'd love even more flexibility, she likes the relationships she's made since working in person.

In that sense, McCormick harks back to a more millennial version of work as meeting and befriending coworkers. As Insider's Rebecca Knight reported, amid the Great Resignation and a new era of all-remote work, the work friendship is out, especially for Gen Z.

"Since starting my job, basically my only full-time friends that I don't have from college are coworkers," McCormick said. "Those have been the easiest people to get to know and see on a regular basis, go out for drinks after work."

Williams, the financial-services specialist, said she feels she's missed out on two years of her "working 20s" — specifically on meeting more people and the opportunities that come with such networking.

"Working from home is cool," she said. "I mean, I get to hang out with my dog all day, and I don't need to wear the traditional slacks and collared T-shirts."

She added: "Working remotely, you're being told that you're doing a good job — but I think when you're in the office and people can kind of see that, I think it does more of a ripple effect than it does at home."

Though they haven't been in the workforce all that long, some Gen Zers have already held multiple jobs — contributing to their generation's role in the Great Resignation.

Tiara Williams realized she could get a pay bump by switching jobs.

Tiara Williams

In October, Ryan Roslansky, the CEO of LinkedIn, told Time that Gen Zers were leading the way in workers changing jobs, adding that job transitions among Gen Zers on LinkedIn had ticked up by 80% year-over-year.

"Young workers can write their ticket now in a way that was definitely not true 10 years ago or even three years ago, because the labor market is so tight," Twenge said. "There's a lot of job opportunities out there."

Lauren Stiller Rikleen, the president of the Rikleen Institute for Strategic Leadership, previously told Insider that remote work gave Gen Zers the upper hand in amplifying demands for workplace autonomy, adding that their lives were turned upside down during an impressionable time.

"They had so much taken away from them in terms of access — you can go on and on with what has been lost," she said.

"That reframes your thinking," she said, adding that people in that situation "start to think about what's important" to them and how to express that.

Williams, who has experienced both prepandemic in-person work and remote work, is one of those job switchers. She said that when she started looking at new jobs, she realized she could get three to five years' worth of raises in a pay bump just by switching roles.

Given the rise in social-media use and pandemic disruption during such formative years, it makes sense that Gen Z would tend to be lonelier and more depressed than other generations.

Social media can be a strain on mental health.

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Gen Z is stressed, lonely, and depressed.

The American Psychological Association's 2020 Stress in America survey found that Gen Z adults, ages 18 to 23 at the time, reported the highest levels of stress among different generations. About a third of Gen Zers surveyed said their mental health was worse than it had been the year prior, and over seven in 10 reported feeling "miserable or unhappy" in the past two weeks.

The National Survey of Drug Use and Health found about a 7% increase from 2019 to 2020 in 21- to 25- year-olds who reported having a mental illness.

"There's steadily more depression and self-harm over the course of Gen Z," Twenge said, pointing to data from the National Survey of Drug Use and Health indicating when depression rates started to rise among different age groups. "So those born in, say, early 2000s have a higher rate of depression than those born in the late 1990s, because it kept rising among both teens and among young adults."

Outside of the workforce, the typical geriatric Gen Zer is seen as a tastemaker.

Gen Z is leading the way in consumer trends — reviving middle parts, baggy jeans, and Y2K fashion and letting skinny jeans and side parts fall by the wayside.

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Jason Dorsey, who runs the Center for Generational Kinetics, a research firm in Austin, Texas, previously told Insider that a new generation tends to enter the spotlight around when its members turn 25 because they're old enough to begin exerting economic influence.

Since emerging as the new "it" generation, Gen Z has led the way in consumer trends — reviving middle parts, baggy jeans, and Y2K fashion and letting skinny jeans and side parts fall by the wayside.

In a little over a decade, the oldest Gen Zers will take over the economy. A Bank of America research report in 2020 found that Gen Z earned $7 trillion across its 2.5 billion-person cohort. It estimated that that income would grow to $17 trillion by 2025 and to $33 trillion by 2030, representing 27% of the world's income and surpassing that of millennials the following year.

Dorsey predicted that with this kind of influence, the generation would continue to shift and drive conversations for the next 15 years.

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